Another Gender Gap: Men Spend More Time in Leisure Activities

Men spend more time than women – about five hours more a week – in leisure activities such as TV, playing games and sports.

Taking paid and unpaid work time together, working-age American men and women differ very little in their total work time, according to analyses of the American Time Use Survey. But when it comes to leisure activities, there’s a gender gap.

Men spend about 10 hours more a week than women in paid work. But women even that out because they spend about six hours more than men doing household work, plus they spend about three additional hours taking care of the children, bringing the total work time to 45.6 hours per week for men and 45.2 hours for women.

However, men spend more time than women in leisure activities, which includes TV time, playing games, sports and a series of other activities. The gender gap in leisure is about five hours per week.

Men who are fathers enjoy more leisure time than mothers; the gap is close to three hours per week. For adults who do not have young children at home, the leisure gap is wider: men without young children at home spend about five hours per week more in leisure than women in the same situation. Read more

4 Comments

This research doesn’t even touch on the subject whether the household work is continous, if the question were stated poorly (Which I suspect they were) then a woman would surely be prompted for example to say that she did household work between 5pm – 7 pm each day, however, is this continous work or is it broken up into smaller segments? Perhaps men try to calculate “How long time did it take to do the dishes, take out the trash?” and so forth, while a woman thinks “Well I was finished with all of the work 7pm”. We all know that when we do household chores we don’t have a continous string of cleaning and fixing, asuming that which this research does is inaccurate.

This is why you need to post with your research what kind of questions you stated so there could actually be pew research. How is it pew research if we’re not able to replicate the conditions of your questionaire?

I wonder when Pew will do some serious research on the Death Gap, one which overwhelmingly favors the male Disposable Sex…in combat, at work, and in the actuary tables. It’s shocking how little attention is devoted to The Woman Racket (Moxon) which creates serious sex gaps…gaps which are far more significant than most so called ‘gender gaps’. Be nice to see some balance from Pew in what is a fascist feminist world.

About Pew Research Center Pew Research Center is a nonpartisan fact tank that informs the public about the issues, attitudes and trends shaping America and the world. It conducts public opinion polling, demographic research, media content analysis and other empirical social science research. Pew Research Center does not take policy positions. It is a subsidiary of The Pew Charitable Trusts.